It’s a View, “Everything is OK”.

It’s a View, “Everything is OK”.

The Manchurian Chan Master, Hsuan Hua, often said, “Everything is OK”. And, for him it was. He arrived in America in the mid-fifties, a penniless monk who lived on a rooftop in San Francisco for ten years, begging for food once a day, and spending the rest of his time on the roof sitting in meditation. That all changed when a professor from San Francisco State University, Ron Epstein, who from time to time noticed him on the streets, asked if he could meditate with him. The Master said “yes” and then led the professor to his rooftop abode, and the two sat in meditation together.

The Master’s life was to abruptly change.

Ron had an incredible experience and told his students about it. Pretty soon the Master had a regular group going to San Francisco to sit on the roof with him. All felt a “response” meditating with the Master and offered to get him a small apartment. That small apartment, as it turned out, was the first Taoist temple in America, abandoned.

Under new stewardship, it became the beginning of the “Sino-American Buddhist Association”, and later “Dharma Realm Buddhist Association” and “Dharma Realm Buddhist University”. By the time of the Master’s passing in 1995, there were over fifty centers, some significant establishments, worldwide.

I had the opportunity to spend ten years with the Master in the early days when the organization was growing very rapidly. This afforded me the opportunity to hear him say “Everything is OK” many, many times, and to see how he could say it and mean it. It was a lesson about being able to walk the talk and I never observed anyone able to do it like the Master.

The secret to the Master’s even mindedness lay in his non attachment and his incredible compassion. He would do anything to help someone learn a lesson.

Once he was standing outside Gold Mountain Monastery, his first real monastery, in a very seedy and poor area of San Francisco’s “Mission District”. A prostitute approached him and asked him to follow her. He said “OK” and did just that.

She led him to her bedroom, stripped, and lay down on her bed inviting the Master. The Master took off his clothes, and, as he puts it, showed her “one of his fifty-two marks of a superman”. 

The Buddha is known to have fifty-two super qualities, circles on the feet, a tuft of hair between his brows, arms that reach beneath the knees, and so forth. But one is a withdrawn penis “like a horse, limp, and withdrawn inside”.

The prostitute looked at the Master startled, as he pointed to his “Superman” quality and asked her “do you want to make love to this”?

 “No” she said, and the Master left.

That evening when the Master related his experience during his evening lecture, all the conservative Chinese left, but the university students got a big laugh out of it. The story illustrates an important point of the “everything is OK” view, and that is that to really have the view you must free yourself of desire and attachment.

The Master once said to us that he had never in his life a single thought of sexual desire, but those of us around him saw that he had no desire for wealth, fame and recognition, or any worldly ambitions. He desired only to teach the dharma.

Once he tore up a million-dollar check and threw it at the donor telling him that his mind was not in the right place. As with the prostitute, he exhibited his non-attachment with the businessman, but in a different way, to teach him to give from the heart without thought of recognition, something that disciple learned.

Two years later, he purchased a home for the nuns overlooking San Francisco Bay, and offered it to the Master

The Master never lay down to sleep, but slept sitting up, and only a few hours a day. He only ate one meal at noon yet taught the dharma twice a day. As in any organization growing rapidly, there were many successes and failures, material losses and gains, and yet the master never wavered. Everything was “OK”.

I think everyone likes to be able to walk their talk and be “OK” with everything, but there is a big catch that makes this ambition so difficult and often impossible in real time. The “catch” is we have attachments and desires, and when these are tested we become weak and confused and often fail to stand up to a challenge. Things may be “OK” to a point, but not beyond it.

To be really “OK” with everything, we must make sacrifices in our lives. The more we can sacrifice, the deeper our “OK” will become. We must be true to ourselves, through and through. The less we are attached and the less we want the broader our possibilities become.

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